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STAAR Program Overview and Resources

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Texas Education Agency staff explain the State of Texas Assessments of Academic Readiness, commonly referred to by its acronym STAAR.

Show Transcript

good afternoon everyone thank you so much for joining us for this session we are going to go ahead and get ready to begin I do just a couple of announcements before we turn it over to our prisoner so I'll go ahead and share my screen at this time can y'all hear me okay thank you so first of all I want to welcome you all to the Texas migrant Interstate program migratory students interstate interstate coordination conference the formula to success my name is dr. Gina Gonzalez and I will be facilitating this session before we begin I have a couple of announcements as a reminder of the session is being recorded also at the conclusion of this session you will be directed to complete a brief. to evaluate this session please provide your honesty back so that we can design future sessions finally please be sure to mute your self and place any questions that you may have in the chat you very much and at this time I will go ahead and stop sharing my screen and turn it over to our prison term is Rachael Griffin Rachel is here sorry about that I am so happy to be here with you guys today I apologize for not being able to be on camera I'm actually traveling so trying to make this work as best I can and hopefully the internet holds up I am here to talk with you guys a little bit about the star program to give an overview of what exactly it is and then talk about where some of our resources are for this assessment restart which is what is the star program so in Texas we have a number of different types of Assessments that we offer throughout the year things that we want districts to be using as part of their sort of whole view assessment of student progress and Student Success and so four star it is the summative assessment that we have in our state it's there to measure the Mastery of student expectations in a given we do it at the end of an instructional here we ask that districts use that as like I said part of a whole picture when they're thinking about retention promotion you know and it is also part of our graduate requirements for the state Fortunes in grades three through eight they are all required to take the Star based on the grade level they are enrolled in this is also a federal requirement the students will be testing in various subjects they will do reading and math every single year with science and social studies being spread out as they go for students taking an end of course assessment Oreo see we offer five of those it's algebra biology US history and then English 1 in English to these are the assessments that they have to have I completed and successfully completed before they're able to graduate with a diploma from a Texas public school we do have some other Pathways for them to get there but I'm not going to muddy the waters today since we're focusing on Star this is how we generally most our students use the path to graduation additionally for students in COC these are kids who should be completing a course when they take this and I wanted to bring this up because I do now with our migrant students sometimes the coursework and where they are in it can be less than clear so just to make sure that it's communicate that the star you see is only expected to be given to a student once the majority of the standards have been covered when they've had an opportunity to learn so generally we would say that you know semester 1 semester 2 or a B semester but if you have pauses in that student curriculum or they're having a take something and they haven't moved on to the second part then that would not be an appropriate time for this unit 2 test for yossi so these are students who may be only have that one semester we want to make sure that again they've had the bricks of the standard in class in their instruction so that we feel confident that they can demonstrate their mastery four star of this is kind of an update for this year we've we've kind of moved all over the place in terms of testing back when I was a high school English teacher we had the tax test and that was essentially an untimed test and students could ended take all day on whether that be because they told to Pryor teacher that they needed some testing strategy that caused them to pause a million times or because they took a nap in the middle of it who knows but it was on time so then we did look at the data for star and realize that once we were online we were able to see that the vast majority of students are completing these tests within two to three hours for at the max so it didn't really make sense to essentially drain an entire instructional day so that we could administer the star so we had put a time limit on it unfortunately that became a problem last year so now we are back my boss likes to say this is why we can't have nice things we would try to give us some flexibility at one point and it didn't seem to be administered way we wanted to so now what we have is an allowable testing time 7 hours for the star so it's one instructional they essentially same school day most kids like I said we'll be able to complete any one of these assessments Within hours or less but if they need additional time. They they have it they however cannot extend past a school day or 7 hours 7 hours being the d'max exceptions do exist for the students who have been approved stirred a designated sport I'll talk in a little bit about what that is so 14 my P purposes the one big document that everybody should be familiar with and have already flagged on their computer is test Administration information manual that is posted on the t e a test Administration resources page and I've highlighted the table of contents here so that you can see what it contains but also just to show you that I'm obviously the man self isn't going to be everything you need but it references a lot of things from some of our online sources and particularly are what we call the dccr so I'm going to kind of show you where to find some of this information today and why it's important to know it as part of the star program and administration so this is what are we call it again and I apologize in advance there are a lot of acronyms I'm sure you're familiar with that situation but in assessment we we live the district and campus testing coordinator resources are the dccr it's linked here you'll have a copy of this I believe after your conference so you can get to the anybody can get to this it's not behind any kind of firewall or login so it is our resources that we have available for any of the people who are going to be involved with administering a estate test STAR included there are a couple of things on here that I'm going to I was really hoping this would play for you and it's unfortunately not other so a couple of things I want to highlight a are the accommodations of the test security the online Administration and the complete Administration section in the dccr as you're moving through your manual these are the places that it's really going to refer you to 40 MIP the other ones are more District Focus in state district accommodations accommodations in star of especially now that we are in an online world this is a really important thing for us to all be familiar with what they are who therefore and you know what they should look like in the actual assessment when we talked about accommodations for Star we're talking about making sure that all students have the opportunity to demonstrate regardless of the content of presentation or the responsible to the test what it is that they know that we real strive to make sure that all of our assessments particularly the STAAR test does as much as we can still keeping it a standardized test to provide students with the specific accommodations that they need and that can look like a number of different these can help students who are routinely effectively using these things in the classroom and instruction students who are served by 504r dorel pack committees and students who require the use of accessibility feature or doesn't it it's important unexpected or emergency situation so these are students who may be you know the day before the test it always seems to happen that a kid it will break their arm or lose their glasses and what do we do for those kids what kinds of things can we provide to are they can still access the test we have a pretty pretty impressive Suite of accommodations that were able to provide two students with our test so I've provided a here in the far left is where we're looking at the ones that are available for star and you can see it's the one with the most everything from basic transcribing to Braille in a refreshable braille online oral Administration Zora text to speech which is what we have online available to students as well as some of those at the bottom that I mentioned that require T approval and we'll talk about why those are important to to sort of single out in a moment this is it accommodations policy document so in the dccr if you have a student who is a student who's working with tmip another state and that students district has said that the kid receives an accommodation if you need to know how to best Port that out-of-state partner you are going to want to know about the accommodation policy documents so again these are in the dccr as you can see there pretty they're going to give you which assessments these are available for parts of a test can they apply to descriptions of them and then what they might look like so this helps you to explain to those Partners how they can best support the student is a lot of links in demonstration videos just a lot of really great information and again each one of those combinations that was on that original table I showed you has its own policy document so should that be something that you need to dive into its there in the Deep but some of those that I mentioned earlier and that required the approval these are the ones that I did want to highlight simply because they are the ones that for one of two reasons or both they are going to be at require an adult's intervention or assistance and their for an adult's who is may be interacting with the secure temperature or it changes the nature of the test enough to where it is maybe no longer considered a standardized Administration and so there's some particular instructions that we provide around these accommodations that we would want to sure that the district is communicating to the state partners that T&T MIP staff were able to help support and make clear so that they know exactly how to execute these particular think so I'm going to show you real fastest what some of those could complex transcribing this is going to be where we're actually having a test administrator record a student's responses to any number of things on the test there quite a few items that might ask student to enter something text box into a short response or even on the rla test those longer essays needs are going to be students who do not have a way to adequately access maybe a speech-to-text or students who cannot use you don't you don't have use of their hands and cannot use a keyboard so this is going to be in adults who is essentially transcribing every single letter every single, and into the testing platform and so this is something that obviously it would require some additional training which is also linked in the dccr it's going to require them to know what they can and cannot ask of the student so for example you know part of our rubric for complex transcript for the r l a s a grammar and mechanics and so we cannot ask a student to clarify do you mean to spell it this way you know do you want to put a, they're the student actually has to do those things independently so there's some training around complex circuits transcribing that has two Ben and I just wanted to point at that one out because I think that's the one we honestly get the most requests for so a district would know this is appropriate for the student tmip would need to make sure that the state partner is away but this is something that's going to have to happen the day of and then that person who will be with the student would have to be appropriately trained so a couple of additional steps if we're dealing with any students who have this level of support that needed the day of testing another one similar is the math scribe so this is helping students with their calculations on things like scratch work when they are working on some of those linked their calculations particularly the ones where they're not allowed a calculator this isn't it again when where we would provide some additional and specific information about what can and cannot be asked of the student and some additional information for how to best document what intentions were we also have extra day and obviously this one is certainly going to require some pre-planning if a student has extra day, dacian in the state of Texas that means that there is a plan for that test is going to be broken up for that student typically these are going to be students with some sort of medical condition they may be fatigued very you know they usually have maybe a short instructional day and therefore asking them to sit for a 4-Hour test 3 hour test to even if that's how long it would take them might be asking too much to these are students who for whatever reason need a significant break and therefore is there testing for instance there testing I'll use r l a a as an example just consider a link to your test you know maybe they're doing the reading portion one day and the writing the next it is if there is a specific break that is planned by the district and communicated to get into that test administrator to know that what is something that will need to happen for the student it can't be a we'll see how they go the day of we already have that by giving them the the full date you know let's see how they how they don't think it's sick the day I would have a sick policy for them to come we have things like that but these are the students who have just a special need of some some type where they have those addition that additional school day so obviously if you're planning testing sites you're looking for people to be tough to administrators these are things that would have to be communicated to them so that set up appropriately for the student if it's not the district actually has to submit an irregularity and a lot of times with students you don't receive extra dividends that their test is not scored because it's considered a significant enough impediment to their success that the score is no longer considered valid we also have amorphous bucket that we wish to call other and this is going to be when the district realizes that there's something that that kid might need or whoever is giving instruction the student realizes that the student need something that's tangential maybe to one of the policy documents that we have or the eligibility criteria that we have not quite there right on the edge of it and so the district can reach out to us and to make a case for hey here's what we would like to provide to the student does that mean it's still in the parameters of a standardized Administration and we will give them a yes or no and if we give them yes again we provide that additional Administration information to let them know how that should be carried out these are really rare this is I think last year you know we tested 5.8 million students or something like that I think we only had maybe before that were approved and in only maybe six that were actually submitted so incredibly rare very unlikely that you will see an other half I didn't want to point out that these can require some additional potential materials that need to be collected or some prep work on behalf of the test administrator so something to think about when your districts are communicating what those students might mean so how are things going to be prepped for the day of what we have practice resources that are available online to anybody you may have actually already gone in and seen these resources so on Texas assessment. Gov at which we link here you can go in and you can look at the online practice test you can do this just as a general public facing user or you can do it as a studio this is just a really great way to make sure that students are familiarized with the tools I say that it's it's important that they get as much exposure as is appropriate obviously don't have like several days for these kids to sit down and figure it out but the more familiar with it they are the more likely it is that they will use the tools that we have embedded in our in our testing system and in that environment so that they know where they are or what they look like and they don't have to rely on you know the appendix or their test administrator day up to figure those things out so when you go to Texas assessment and you click on this online practice test card you're going to see something pop up that looks like this like I said anyone can sign in as a guest and see the test delivery system environment it's going to look like that on the left and students can actually sign in if you have their tsds ID they can sign in and they're going to get the Pacific accommodations that are set up for them in tied so anybody can log in on the left students can log into either as well but if they log in with their tsds ID and they are named they can actually see exactly what the test is going to look like the day of CID those accommodations that they might qualify for are already set for them and they don't have to do any of the selecting try to play around with it I point that one out in particular for students who have speech-to-text as one of their account patient because that's actually unavailable and the general public site so if a student needs to play with the speech-to-text tool they will have to log in with a t s i t s dsid the reason for that is a speech-to-text is a very very costly and there's only so much sort of I don't know what the actual technical term is Voorhees bandwidth that we have stored for its use and we would basically burn through it if people were just going in and playing with it to see what the two look like so we try to reserve that for the students who have been identified as needing it so that they can go in and they can actually use it and not run it off the sexually so The Star online practice test once you open it it looks like this you can select any grade level that we offer you can select released or practice test they said she look the same one as just a mock-up in one is something that actually have been admitted it's already here you see the last year's 2023 starring which one and this is that list of accommodations that I was mentioning so everything from color settings to large Mouse pointers they can change the text-to-speech word prediction Zoom spell check all kinds of things that they can play around with that you can say I promise and get familiar with just to see what this looks like they're also going to have this general information and help guide information at the front basically their test directions read to them if they have Text-to-Speech as one of their accommodations and then you see what the actual test look like so this is exactly what a kid who took the 2023 starring which one released test would have seen last year there's two panels they have that they can learn to play with at expand and to make smaller there's some options for what they can do as far as highlighting there's things like marking for review opening sticky notes playing around. And then I just hit the top things like line reader dictionaries and there's lots of things on this page that I would hate for a student to open up the day of and be just completely distracted by because they want to push all the buttons with the kids or so this is something that we do highly encourage their familiar with before the day of testing one of the things that I want to show you're so what can some of those things look like for online practice we have things called rollovers as you can see you like where a kid can essentially roll over a part of the text it's going to simplify the language for them we have pop-ups or vocabulary that might be difficult for some students and these are things they have to qualify for but again they're really great in bed and supports where these kids but we have to make sure they know where they are and that the people who are providing the Testaments tration and the instruction know where they are as well and know to be using them and to make sure that the students are familiar with them prior to testing things like spelling assistance as I mentioned Punnett squares it's all kinds of great stuff in there but we just want to make sure that it's stuff they know to fight another thing that I did want to talk about that you'll see referenced in that tmip manual is the online testing app LG resources so this could have been an entire like 3-hour presentation on its own but I did want to mention especially since we're talking about an out-of-state program we're having to work online there are a number of things I have to happen and none of them are optional as you can see here so District tmip stuff out of state Partners they really have to work together to make sure the technology is prepared in advance for the student has an uninterrupted test experience you cannot just have a kids show up day of hand them a Chromebook and have them login using your test ticket there are a lot of things that had to happen to Chromebook to prepare it to make sure that it's running the right operating systems it's running the correct Lena The Voice packs will work if that student needs text-to-speech there are different things for assistive technology system checks that are tired there's examples in here of you know how students sign in how do they navigate a number of different things so basically this is sort of your check listen again this is in the dccr this is just me opening up that little carrot for technology research then you can dependents of materials here there are things that we want to make sure that we have prepared for the kids I will tell you we we unfortunately do even register you're in state we do get many calls of the week of testing during the two-week window where they have set of kid down and they said okay we're trying to get him to respond to the to the essay part and it's not capturing it and it come come to find out if the device the students working on had not been updated in a couple of months and some sort of update had happened in the software from the the maker and the students need a computer was not compatible Essentia with artists delivery system so that is one thing I can also tell you very recently and some of you may have just found this in your everyday life we have to require Spanish text to speech and we do have that option Spanish has as available for students up to 5th grade and they were logging into their Chromebooks just for instructional reasons and realizing the text-to-speech Spanish voice pack weren't there and it turns out Google someone someone I'm sure is probably on on leave because of this but essentially they updated to a new operating version and it did not have the voice packs for Spanish included in it so that was specific to start that's just anybody in the world who was using that particular Chrome interface there is no Spanish voice pack you can reinstall it you can revert back to do you know version 1819 but it just was not there so when we sit down and have kids do our interim testing or are we sent a standalone fuel test obviously there was a big group of kids who did not get an accommodation or would not a combination that they needed if we weren't able to support all of his District's kind of last-minute updating all of their devices so please don't be those people we really want to encourage the technology staff out of state to know that they are supported here that we have people both act tea and as well as our cambium testing partner to our vendor that will be able to help them set up anything that they need to everything from just the basics minimum minimum operating system all the way through you know if for some reason you have stood he needs like refreshable Braille you know which is probably the most complex thing that we do online which is Jaws readers and all kinds of external components so it can sound daunting but we managed it every single year successfully and we are here to absolutely support with the technology piece cuz we know that that can be that can be overwhelming both to communicate in to execute so with test security section that I did want to talk about a test security is very important and I understand that for our team if he Partners its kind cross your fingers and hope it all goes well right cuz you're not there to monitor live so training on test accurate e and making sure everybody understands their roles what's allowed and was not allowed really important and knowing what to do doesn't necessarily have been so they're artistic 30 sections in the dccr that go over many things what are testing irregularities how do I avoid them by setting up you know everything that I need to prior to the time what can it look like when a student is involved in cheating and what do we do with that what are some incidents that seem like they might be a problem but actually aren't necessarily testing irregularities what can I do to plan for 6 before during and after an Administration as well as some of the security forms that are required things like both disciplinary forms steam charts the host of test security is something that has to be completed signed turned back in I think you guys are going to be doing it through confirming through a PDF if I'm sorry if I'm incorrect on that what the process is but is a fillable PDF that can be print save electronically and then return basically just stating in and out of station that this was something training was something that was received it is supposed to be completed with every Administration for the person who is in charge and then any get customers Traders underneath them it is is to be cleared at least once obviously and then it's kind of act that key persons discussion so instead this will be our district testing coordinators out-of-state these would be your your state-level pay my PECO procedural testing irregularities are going to be the things that are less severe fairly common minor deviations from testing procedures sort of this can be that you know a student bless their online test open and went to the restroom and came back they forgot to close it but if we can verify that nobody got on to that computer and nobody touched it and nothing happens to it and it's it's fine it is a deviation it should have happened is monitoring here but it is not going to be the end of the world's not going to cause us to avoid that students test so that would be we're just a summary of those in a plan of action for making sure it doesn't happen the future would need to be submitted tmip so they can report that back to the agency that is a thank you for the information but we aren't necessarily going to follow am I something sounds Shifty about it we aren't going to follow up with those little short little bulleted list versus this the serious violations obviously this is the one that we're going to be more concerned with these are going to be in this is where we have adults in the room directly or indirectly assisting students which responses to test questions tampering with the student responses and that might look like what I mentioned earlier where you're at you're giving a student that complex and you recognize that their misspelling words left and right and so you fix them for them or you add that. Or that, or what have you or you think you know this isn't a good response I'm going to respond in a better way for the student you know we generally do not get serious testing violations and unfortunately there are some bad actors out there so they think they're there helping the student and what ends up happening is that student their test gets voided and then obviously there's usually some sort of penalty for the person who traded the serious testing violation can also be things like taking notes of what's on the test taking pictures and sharing that on social media which has become an issue in the last few years the are secure materials even after they even after the test is complete we do not release our tests until the end of the academic school year so we haven't fortunately had to track down a couple of teachers here and there over the years to have taking pictures a test material and posted it you know Tik tok's or to their Instagram just to talk about like I think the kids did great on this question thinking well the test is done so you know it's not going to work that's not the case so all of that stuff covered in training and is what you will be receiving from your TV IP coordinator I think maybe we can talk about the end with the what that looks like as far as links I just really important stuff to know and make sure that we cover we've made everyone aware of so for serious testing violations I called him two strikes against whoever is in charge of providing students to test out of state I'm not sure what we call all of them so the person in charge they need to notify the chief of my people in order as soon as possible of a serious violation they're required to conduct what we call a prompt investigation and there is an information in the dccr about what exactly looks like there are specific steps there are details that we want you to collect but I'm in all of that has to happen in a fairly timely manner we provide a 10-day window for collecting that stuff and we do get 10 days and not say just one because we wanted to be thorough we don't want it to be maybe here say you know a student claiming a teacher did something and we just submit something on the students word we do need to do a little bit of digging to make sure that every piece of information evidence that we collect is there cuz it's actually doesn't stay in the student assessment division it goes over to our security investigations team at the state level and they are they're going to be the one to reach out follow up with this but again scan my P staff not being there you're going to have to help collaborate and coordinate what that investigation looks like and make sure all of pieces of that puzzle put together before it's submitted back to the investigations division and I've got my contact information here I do want to make sure we had a lot of time for the I think he is so I think I hit my 30-minute Mark which is 3 information for t a we know that you've got the key and my pee information but just so you know if there's ever questions that you have or if you want to share with your state Partners you know the student assessment division has a help desk the link is there we also have direct phone line and that you can ask to speak to myself getting my name is Rachael Griffin or you can go to our website and find an enormous amount of information some of which has already been linked in this deck we are we're here to help we are largely about customer service that is what we do that help desk ticket and we answer maybe nine hundred every week tickets that are submitted from across the state and we have you no response time of about 10 minutes so it's a very fast way to get the information that you need and to make sure that you got a point of contact call back if their follow-up questions certainly during the administration if there are questions that come up tmip will be your point of contact but in leading up to it if you have questions about information that you find in the dccr or like I said earlier if you have questions about any of the technology pieces you are more than welcome to contact us directly I know it's a lot of information I'm kind of asking you to drink from a firehose situation so we definitely want to make sure that we're providing as much support as we can okay I'm stopping share more people join us since I started talking now that I can actually see everybody I know again that was a lot of information if anybody wants me to open up and go back to any slides I'd be happy to do so but otherwise I'm just or for any kind of questions that you have General specific or otherwise I don't know if you had a chat if there are any questions in the chat Rachel there are no questions in the chat right now so we'll open it up to see if anyone has any additional questions for you okay if there are no Quest then I would just want to remind you that at the conclusion of this session you will receive a survey we do ask that you go ahead and fill that out and provide feedback the tmip team will be looking at this feedback. closely to ensure that we are able to provide top quality presentations moving forward but feel free to stay on if you have any questions for Rachel and Rachel thank you again for joining us we know you are on the road and we appreciate you stopping and stopping your travels to join us this afternoon so thank you everyone for joining us you have questions feel free to ask before Rachel log. Thank you so much so there is a question if you are here and you had the same one there was a question about how do you be actually become certified to administer star so I don't know if dr. Gonzalez wants to kind of take this but this is actually what team if he is going to be I'm helping Courtney with you so they are going to be sending out at the links for training and that is essentially hot you're going to go through some training modules so that you know what to do and where to find every and once you have completed those you'll be signing like I mentioned an oath an attestation saying that you understand what your your duties are your role and then you are essentially good to go put those links will come from tmip not from T yanked so I would say follow up with dr. Saleh you have additional questions thank you and yes we actually have the program manager is Wendy Court who is also joining us in this session and she will actually be your point of contact regarding anything bobbing around the administration of Star as Rachel mentioned that we are in the process of securing those training modules and sitting out that information and there's you just posted that we are in that process of working with the TA investment team we also have Caliente she wants to join or add any additional information but know that that process is in the approval process and so once we have something set in place you will receive more information for my program manager Wendy Ford dr. Gonzalez I have nothing else to add just follow the guidance that was provided thank you so much for that guidance I want to stress that he also just mentioned that we plan to host a q-and-a session for our partners days in the next several weeks so if you are from one of our partners Jake please be on the lookout for that information as well thank you Wendy I would highly encourage anyone with whatever your role maybe I am if you're involved at all with start testing and you would definitely benefit from going to that online practice site like I said and just try The Experience what it is that the students are expected to do now that we live in an online world and especially since last year we went through a redesign with many of our subjects items it's not just a simple ABCD as you saw when I was scrolling through there were a lot of things that they could click on but some of the items that are actually available to the students are you no drag-and-drop or elimination or they're creating tables so they're fairly involved item types that are a little more rigorous than simply multiple choice and so if we aren't giving students the opportunity to see that and perhaps that's all they're getting an instruction I can be very jarring to them the day of testing to show up and not know why you even interact with this item maybe they do know the content they do know but they don't know how to respond to it so just getting a sense of what that looks like in all of the work that might need to go into familiarizing your test administrator and your student with it I think would be great benefit thank you Rachel it's a great recommendation if there are no additional questions thank you once again for joining us this afternoon please sure to fill out that survey and the conclusion of the session thank you all have a wonderful afternoon enjoy the rest of the conference thank you

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